 Aloha, I'm Marsha Joyner and we are navigating the journey. Navigating the journey is dedicated to exploring the options and choices in life and to assist people to talk about their wishes. It's time to transform our culture so we ship from not talking about those parts which are sometimes buried in the shade or swept under the rug of history. After watching 14 episodes of Ken Burns The Vietnam War, I felt it important not only to talk about the war and the film and to have a totally different point of view. Our guest today is the son of the first Marine killed in action in Vietnam. He died February 16, 1964, a U.S. Marine in Vietnam. The advisory combat assistant era which ran from 1954 to 1964, and I know most of you say well were we in the war in 1954, yes. Nowhere in the film did we get to see the children of the American troops in Vietnam. The President of the United States of America takes pride in presenting the Navy Cross posthumously to Major then-Captain Donald Edward Kelper, United States Marine Corps, for the extraordinary heroism in connection with the bombing of the capital of Kendo Theater in Saigon. On the evening, February 16, 1964, while serving as an advisor attached to the 4th Vietnamese Marine Corps infantry battalion, upon becoming aware of the bomb being placed in the lobby of the theater, Major Kelper, who was standing nearby with a companion, unhesitatingly entered the main area of the theater, shouted to the occupants, United States servicemen and their dependents to take cover. This warning provided the time for numerous unsuspecting individuals to obtain cover by laying between the rows of the seats. Second later, the bomb exploded, fatally wounding Major Kelper and another person, and approximately fifty others. Though his prompt, encourages action in warning the theater patrons of the imminent explosion, Major Kelper undoubtedly saved many, many seriously injured and possible death. His self-sacrificing efforts were in keeping with the highest tradition of the United States Naval Service. Our guest today is Donald Edward Kelper. He's a consultant to nonprofits. He's a grant writer. He's region one, Democratic Party, Oahu County. And my dear, dear friend, Aloha, Donald. Aloha, thank you for having me. Donald, I want to talk about you and your father, but especially growing up as a child in that environment where Vietnam, the men serving in Vietnam were looked down and called all kinds of names, and it was not a really nice time to be a child, the son of a hero. It was a, well, I was young when my father was killed, and it, I think the best that I could say starting out here for people to kind of give you some perspective on how pervasive the effects of the Vietnam War, excuse me, on American society, is that if you look at the Vietnam Memorial and you look at the 58,000 plus names on that wall, all of which but eight are men, consider that for each one of those young men whose name is listed on that wall, they're left behind parents, siblings, in many instances, grandparents, a number of them, like my father, were married, had children. And when you consider that and then you see the magnitude of the ripple effect of what the Vietnam War did to this country in terms of collateral damage, my father's death altered our family's trajectory. We can speculate, you know, some of you wonder, it's like, well, what would have happened had he lived and whatever and come home, but, you know, he didn't. Our, you know, we, part of the reason why I ended up being out here in Hawaii, you know, was due to that, it affected, it had negative repercussions on a lot of my family. I don't want to get into it too personally on there because there were some things I just really don't even want to talk about. So where were you born? I was born in Pasadena, California. So then when your father was transferred out here, your family moved out? My father was actually, we were stationed in Quantico, Virginia at the time with the Marine Corps, you know, it's a base training area south of Washington, D.C. He, to give a little bit of a background, my father was one of the founding officers of what is known today as Force Recon. The Marine Corps' reconnaissance battalions. He was the founder of the Pathfinders. He was a counterinsurgency, he was considered a counterinsurgency expert and an expert on, you know, I mean, he worked with other, you know, training other people, including, you know, other soldiers of other countries in survival techniques and being out behind people's lines because that's what they did. He was, we were in, he was stationed at Camp Elminton, California when I was born. And then immediately after that, he was transferred with a number of people when they formed the Second Marine Reconnaissance Battalion on the East Coast in Camp Lejeune. So he was moved out there and he was, you know, and then after that we were moved up to Washington, D.C., where he was served, you know, in the Pentagon for a while. But he'd always wanted to be back out in the field. He was considered, you know, a counterinsurgency expert. You know, he was involved in a number of, I think, ultimately dubious enterprises on behalf of the United States. In 1960, he was sent to the Congo, the Belgian Congo on the, you know, which was then declaring its independence from Belgium. But, you know, what happened was in the Congo was that Belgium still desired to retain its influence and he was sent down there with Belgian troops and it was like a UN intervention in the area when, during the so-called Katanga Rebellion, and when Patrice Lumumba was, became prime minister and was considered a communist for whatever reason, even though he really wasn't. But we intervened. Lumumba was killed and was the guy Mobutu was put in power, who was basically a Belgian puppet and he stayed there till 1998. So I mean, the repercussions that we had from these things that were, you know, and this is kind of the precursor and kind of parallel to what our experience in Vietnam ultimately became because we looked at everything through the war prism of a Cold War perspective in which they were either communists or they weren't. And it never occurred to us to look at it through the lens of, or through, from the perspective of people who were trying to break away from colonialism. And in both instances in the Congo and then later in Vietnam, we intervened in, you know, we tried to impede a nationalist movement thinking that, oh, well the communists were there. And it's like, without ever considering that for some of these people, yeah, they may have been called themselves communists, but the Communist Party was a means to an end, which was independence for their country. Well, we see that because the Americans decided to divvy up North and South Vietnam, North and South Korea, and all of them wanted an independence for themselves. Yeah, and we did that at the end of World War II because we made decisions that we were going to, you know, we made decisions on the basis of occupation and in the aftermath of the vacuum of the Japanese withdrawal at the end of World War II without, again, considering the repercussions of what happened. So, yeah, first of all, Korea got divided and we got into a war over there, over that. And the second one with Vietnam, we, in the aftermath of the French petite at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the French withdrawal, the country was to be temporarily divided pending national elections and reunification. And we prevented that because for whatever our reasons, we feared that Ho Chi Minh was going to be elected, which undoubtedly probably would have been elected had three elections been allowed to occur. But what happened was is we set up a puppet regime in South Vietnam. Initially, for a short period, it was under an emperor, a guy named Bao Dai, who was quickly deposed. Can we go to break and Donald, can we, when you come back, let's talk about what happened immediately after that. Okay. Okay. We'll be right back in a minute. Right here at the Prince of Investments, I'm your host, Prince Dai, each and every Tuesdays at 11 a.m. Hawaii time. I'm going to be right here. Stop by here from some of the best investment minds across the globe. And real estate, finances, stocks, head funds, managers, all that great stuff. Thank you. Hello. And we're back with Donald Kelper, who is the son of a Vietnam hero. And we're talking all about Vietnam, about Donald growing up without a father. But let's talk about the war itself, about, well, let me say what I know. I was in high school the day the Dnb and Fu fell. And in those days, we taught history and geography separately. So we had this great teacher that taught us all about the French being in Indochina for a hundred years and how the French, the people of Vietnam, wanted the French to go home. After World War II, the French came back and the Vietnamese said, no, no, no, you all go home. And the first item on the agenda for the new UN was the Vietnamese asking that the French go home. And apparently that message did not get anywhere. So it didn't go anywhere. So the French are there. Then the French fall at Dnb and Fu in 1954 and the Americans swoop in and the rest is history. What happened was in 1954 with the French withdrawal, they temporarily divided the country. South Vietnam was basically an artificial construct. We need to recognize that. It's important for us to, when we assess our own Vietnam experience, to understand that the war, the government in South Vietnam never enjoyed popular support. It was propped up primarily through U.S. dollars and U.S. material support and eventually U.S. military support as our own involvement in Vietnam escalated. My father was sent over there in 1963 at a time. This was right after there was a battle north of Saigon in which the South Vietnamese Army did not fare well in there. And the worry was that South Vietnam would fall to the communists. So we upped our own escalation in terms of putting in more advisors in through the military assistance group Vietnam known as MACV. My father was sent over there as part of that. It was a majority of it was Army advisors, but there were a handful of Marine advisors and my father was one of them because he was considered a counterinsurgency expert. Unfortunately, he was over there at a time of serious political instability in Vietnam because President Diem was a Catholic ruling over a country that was primarily Buddhist. Let's say that just as a period here, we have the Catholics came from the French. And the rest of the country were Buddhist. That's the Catholic legacy of that. And there were about 10 to 15 percent of the Vietnamese were and still are Catholic. But the majority are Buddhist. But the thing was is he discriminated against the Buddhists and the Buddhists naturally rebelled. And that was like where we see the famous scenes on film of like what Ken Burns showed in the movie of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire. And then there were a lot of street demonstrations. President Diem's regime was becoming increasingly unstable. The Viet Cong were becoming increasingly emboldened. And the decision was made in Washington in late October that Diem had to go. And President Kennedy at the time acquiesced, saying, okay, you know, Vietnam needs stable leadership, how they thought they were going to stabilize it by overthrowing the president. I don't know. But they acquiesced to what was a military coup. And when you mentioned about my father's being part of the, you know, being the chief advisor to the fourth Vietnamese Marine Battalion, it was a fourth Vietnamese Marine Battalion on November 2nd, which came into Saigon. And my father brought them into Saigon, positioned them around the presidential palace. And then he withdrew to the American Embassy as the battalion and other units assaulted the presidential palace and ultimately killed Diem. This was done. So yeah, Americans wouldn't have their hands on this. I think what we learned from the Burns film was that Kennedy himself and certainly Johnson, Johnson opposed the overthrow of Diem. Kennedy came to lament it. I think simply because the guy was killed. But so here you were, we had this vacuum. And at this time, my father was becoming, my father was appalled. My father, and this is early in the war, you know, realize my father, when you look at 58,000 people dead, you know, in the war, my father was the 215th man killed out of 58,000. So this is very early. My father was writing back and issuing reports saying, we really shouldn't be here. He was writing back home to my mother and to his parents at the time, expressing his foreboding about what was happening and, and, you know, you know, sharing his own views that we shouldn't be in Vietnam. Nevertheless, he, you know, being a soldier, being a Marine, he, you know, he did his duty. He continued to advise his unit. And then ironically, in February 1964, he came back in from the field, being out, they were basically operating the Mekong Delta area. So they came back into the field, from the field. And he came back into Saigon to meet with friends, including his commander, and they were going to go out to dinner. Then something came up in his commander, Joe Taylor, who said he said he wish he would have turned it down, but he felt that he had to go to this meeting. So he, he called up my father and said, well, I can't meet you for dinner tonight. You know, and he said, well, that's okay. I'll go to the movies. So he went to the Kendo Theater and unbeknownst to him and a lot of it at the same time, the Kendo Theater had been targeted that night for a Vietnam terrorist raid in downtown Saigon. And this is in the American compound. And when he got there, he had actually not been sexually standing in the lobby. He had been coming up and he was outside the theater when the Viet Cong unit arrived. And they were, you know, they looked like any other civilians. I think it would be important for me to note that two of the three members of this Viet Cong cell were teenage girls. One shot the American MP and killed him, who was guarding the theater. And then the another ran in while another was holding the car. And the other ran in and she had a 25 pound bomb, TNT. My father followed her into the theater. And at that point when he confronted her, she pulled the whatever, you know, and she dropped the bomb, which meant it was going to go off. And so he raced up stairs up into the theater itself and yelled to everybody to get down. And it was a bomb. Then it went off. He was he was killed instantly. I mean, I'm thankful for that. I think there were a lot of details that were left out that it was, you know, he was it was his commanding officer had to identify him. And I did talk with him before he died. And he said, yeah, he says it was, you know, it was it was pretty horrific. But afterward, we were notified as ironically for our family and for a number of our relatives, like my mother's relatives in California, because we were back in Pasadena at the time. Well, my father was there. They learned about my father's death through the media. Oh, dear. And it was. Oh, that's not that they were at all. My mother was my mother was notified. I mean, in the proper way, because we were at my grandparents. The manner of what happened because the Kindo Theater was a big event at the time. And so it was in the front pages of a lot of the papers because three Americans did die in that 51 were wounded. But everybody else was saved that the theater was full of almost 300 people. They're, you know, they my father was buried with honors in Arlington National Cemetery, his body was brought back home. And we all went back to the you know, the cemetery and everything. I think a really telling thing was like where you saw like the precursor to Vietnam. And I just, you know, this is these are anecdotal stuff, admittedly, from me from my family was my my paternal grandparents, my dad's parents from North Berkeley, Illinois, Rudy and Loretta Kelper were back, obviously, for the funeral and everything. And afterward, they and my mother met with, you know, a number of high-ranking people, the Commodon and the Marine Corps and Wallace Green and the vice president. Actually, there wasn't a vice president at the time, because it was the Speaker of the House. But met with the acting, you know, was I forget who it was that was back then. And then representatives of the president, but also two is they met with Senator Everett Dirksen, from Illinois, which is my father's home state. My father was also the first Marine from Illinois to be killed in the war. Or, you know, the first actually the first person from Illinois and the first person from the Chicago area to be killed in the war. And so they met with Senator Dirksen and Senator Dirksen from what I heard from my mother and a couple other relatives, like my uncles, was that that Senator Dirksen was saying, well, you know, your son, you know, we honor his service and stuff like that. And then my grandmother interrupted them and said, you know what, cut the bull, my son is dead. And I want to know why? Why are we over there? And this is in February 1964. So I mean, there were people that people were asking questions then and we're still asking that question. Yeah. And it was, you know, this was a precursor to where, you know, eventually things escalated. We ended up with the Gulf of Tonkin incident six months later. And the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which, which wasn't, you know, and I think what we need to recognize is that at each point in this thing on here, President Johnson did not, was not in favor of intervention in Vietnam, but he got handed, you know, because Kennedy had been assassinated. So he got handed a thing. And he, you know, I mean, but he went against his own instincts. Yes, that showed. Yeah. And each and every point. And you know, for me, because of all the things he had done with the civil rights and the voting rights, and the, all this, the great society, he could have been one of the great presidents had he not been involved in that war. We are just about out of time. Yeah. But I want to know if you will come back because the war went on for a long time. There's a lot to talk about. I think there is, there's things that we should be talking about. And I think, you know, not just to talk about myself, but you know, that's not what I would like to address is like, where do we go from here? Okay. Where does the country, what kind of lessons should we withdraw from our Vietnam experience? So that's a date. We have a date. You will come back and we'll talk some more. Okay. Thank you. This has been a pleasure spending the time with my dear friend, Donald Kelper. And thank you. We will see you again next week. Aloha.